The last time indie-rock three piece Menomena played Chicago’s Empty Bottle, they ended up on the pavement.
“We were driving up and we couldn’t find a parking spot for the life of us,” said group member Brent Knopf. “In between the street and the sidewalk there’s this little spot of dirt, so I pulled in this little alley and basically parked on the sidewalk right next to the venue. Apparently we were the first band to do that.”
Menomena — Knopf, Justin Harris and Danny Seim of Portland, Ore. — returned to the scene of the parking fiasco Mar. 20, to play a show in support of their third album, Friend and Foe. In a phone interview on the first night of their tour, Knopf talked to North by Northwestern about performing and recording the band’s quirky, loop-based pop. He touched upon “Deeler,” the recording and looping software Knopf created for the band, as well as Friend and Foe’s elaborate album art.
NBN: What’s new on this tour?
Knopf: We’ll be playing well.
NBN: Oh yeah?
Knopf: One thing that’s pretty different is we’ll be traveling with a sound person, that’s pretty exciting.
NBN: Why bring a sound person?
Knopf: We just have a complicated setup compared to most bands. It would be a lot smoother if we have someone working with us whose really familiar with our setup and also familiar with our music.
NBN: Do you play Deeler loops live?
Knopf: No, we don’t, except maybe one loop, just that organ loop for “Strongest Man in the World,” off of our first album, that goes BUM BA BUM BA BUM BA BUM.
NBN: How important is Deeler to the songwriting process?
Knopf: I don’t know, we’ve made music both with and without it. Deeler lets us throw a whole bunch of creative ideas into the pile without having to first edit them and choose which ones are going to make the final cut. Because of that it is pretty useful to us – I hope it’s not crucial. I hope that we would be able to write songs without it. In fact, we all do write tons and tons of solo things outside of Menomena, and every now and then things from those songs get brought inside the Menomena circle.
NBN: You play guitar, keyboards and glockenspiel. How’d you get that job?
Knopf: We pretty much just play whatever we’re more naturally inclined already to do. I’m the most inclined towards keyboard-looking objects, having played piano since second grade. Danny and Justin are both talented drummers, but I think Danny has spent a few more years drumming, and Justin has already played bass since he was in high school, or something like that. Justin taught himself to play the saxophone. Then in terms of guitar, I guess all of us would probably be equally skilled, more or less, in guitar. So whoever can, plays guitar.
NBN: And you guys all sing, right?
Knopf: Yeah, we do all sing. On the new album, we each sing about a third of the time. It’s pretty equally distributed.
NBN: Do you write lyrics separately from each other?
Knopf: Typically, yeah, we’re each in our own space when we write the lyrics. Usually the music comes first and the lyrics come later. So, when the lyrics come later, one of us is arranging the song and piecing together the Deeler loops or whatever. Usually the person who writes the lyrics is usually the person whose singing them, but not always.
NBN: How important are the lyrics to you and the band?
Knopf: It’s interesting, we don’t talk about them a lot. However, I guess the importance is maybe more unspoken, maybe it’s just something that has its own personal significance for each of us. They do mean something — it’s not just playful, at least the lyrics I write. Hopefully they mean something to other people too.
NBN: I just watched your “Wet and Rusting” video. When did you shoot that and what was the idea behind that?
Knopf: We shot that about three weeks ago, and the idea behind it was, “What would it look like if a band all of a sudden had a camera there, and wanted to convey its last will and testament?” The whole idea was for it to be kind of chaotic, almost stream of consciousness, kind of: “Wait, before I die, this is what I want!” “No, before I die this is what I want!”
NBN: The new album seems like it has an almost church vibe at times. There’s an organ on a few songs, and I heard you played with a choir. Is there a reason for that?
Knopf: You mean “Muscle n’ Flo,” that’s the church kind of song? Interesting, there’s kind of this choir sound in the middle of “Muscle n’ Flo.” I guess we do whatever we think will fit the song. Maybe that’s a better question for Justin, he wrote the lyrics. There are some religiously-toned lyrics in the song, so I think that he was probably connecting something lyrically to something musically, but I can’t speak for him. In terms of getting the choir together for our CD release party, that was kind of just for fun, because obviously there’s a lot more singing on the record than we are able to do ourselves. We got a whole bunch of friends and colleagues and they were kind enough to sing for us for our release party. There weren’t any religious overtones to that, far as I know.
Friend and Foe’s cover art
NBN: Did you have an idea for the Friend and Foe artwork before you brought in artist Craig Thompson?
Knopf: Yeah, we had a few ideas. Some of them made the final version, some of them did not. One was the idea of there being die-cut holes in the paper that you could see beyond, with eyeballs poking out of different eyeholes or whatever. There were about four or five aspects of the design that were specifically requested at the get-go and then we contacted Craig. He took the baton and ran farther and faster with it than we ever could of imagined.
NBN: Friend and Foe has been getting some good reviews. Do you read your reviews?
Knopf: For better or worse, I’ve read a few of them. The way of rationalizing it to myself was “to be responsible I need to know how the music is being received in order to adjust my expectations for touring and the like.” Maybe the thing that made me happiest about reviews of the record is there’s not one good song everyone is pointing to. It seems like a review will usually choose a couple of songs to describe as high points or low points. One review’s low point will be another review’s high point. I guess I get a little bit of satisfaction out of that, knowing the music is complicated enough to not be one-dimensional, not for everybody to be “oh this is the good song, and those are the crappy songs.”
NBN: Are there any misconceptions that keep coming up about the band?
Knopf: That’s a good question. I suppose the biggest misconception is the significance of Deeler, having spent more time just sitting in interviews than I ever have using Deeler. Deeler gets a lot of press, I think some people thinks it writes the music for us, or some computer algorithm that we type in some variables and it just spits out, or that we’re an electronic band. That’s the biggest misconception, but it’s not one that worries me too much.